If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino

If on a winter's night a traveler (Italo Calvino, 1979)

Metafiction is always a risky game.  Telling a story about a story has the potential to lose a reader.  That might be why Calvino makes the reader a character in If on a winter's night a traveler. This book about readers, writers, and stories chronicles your adventures (yes, your adventures) as you try to read the novel If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino, which the publisher has botched and mixed with nine other stories.  The odd-numbered chapters are written in second person, directed firmly at You (by the way, you happen to be a single, twenty-something Italian male), while the even numbered chapters are the beginnings of the botched, mixed-up novels you keep tracking down in your quest to find the ending to the story you first started.

Calvino delivers some clever revelations about the expectations of readers, the tricks used by writers, and the whole experience of reading. The first chapter, of course, is the classic example, where he admonishes you to find a comfortable place, remove distractions, and yell at your roommates to turn down the TV.  He lambasts the agenda-ridden dissection of books by academia, explores the interactions of regular readers discussing a book, and probles the motivations of readers - a recurring question is "What kind of book do you like?", and the answer keeps changing. The book is focused on the nature of readers and stories, which is refreshing, and maybe more relatable than a writer writing about writing.

The first person chapters, i.e. the beginnings of the stories, are fairly interesting, and they do get you wanting to read more, but that's the problem: after about the sixth or seventh dead end, you (the real you) start to lose interest in where the book is going, even though you (in the book) are having your own story: falling in love, auditing a literature course, digging through manuscripts at the publisher's, meeting a reclusive author, and traveling to a restricted country to try and find the rest of the stories you have started.

Maybe Calvino knows it's a tiring premise, which would explain the increasing amount of sex in the later chapters. I guess that's an easy way to make a dead-end story-beginning interesting, but he kind of comes off as a misogynist.  We could give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's making a point about popular literature's continued use of women as sexual objects despite these progressive modern times, but he makes the point a little too well.

Arbitrary rating: 3.5 out of 5 roommates turning down the TV